I do not mean to suggest, by the title of this chapter, that those aspects of humanist tragedy I have considered in earlier chapters do not give pleasure. In those chapters, however, I have been mainly concerned with showing the resources of the humanist dramatists and the use they made of them; in this final chapter I shall discuss the experience which results, for readers and spectators, from what these playwrights did with their materials. Nowadays, we are very unlikely to be spectators of humanist tragedy — attempts to try the plays out in the theatre in this century have been few and far between. Nevertheless, as readers, we always have the freedom to be spectators of an imagined performance. Even at the time of their composition, many of these plays probably had more readers than spectators.

I mentioned in the Introduction the problems of trying to read 'historically', that is, trying to read with the eyes and mind of a sixteenth-century reader. We can never entirely shed our own assumptions and preconceptions, and we can never know how close we are getting to those of an earlier age; yet to be aware, as we read, of the response which a contemporary reader might have had to the text is likely to increase our own responsiveness, and this awareness itself can be a source of pleasure.